Necrofier
Hometown: Houston, Texas
Album: Prophecies of Eternal Darkness, out now via Season Of Mist
The notion of a sound needing to be crafted in a particular place has always been funny to me. Sure, black metal almost universally conjures up images of dense, verdant forests (see: Norway and the Pacific Northwest), but some of the best black metal bands ever existed elsewhere. Necrofier take major influence from two of those very acts—Greece’s Rotting Christ and Sweden’s Dissection—as well as adding more than a dose of Southern, swampy doom for good measure. This resulting sound is as melodic and ritualistic as it is terrifying. It’s also beautiful and fun as hell. Plus, this likely-not-super-merry band of Texans have something to say, too. Bland, dollar store Satanism this ain’t, as Prophecies of Eternal Darkness is the result of a lifetime spent trying to figure out life’s biggest questions.
For vocalist and guitarist Bakka Larson, all his reading and reflection came to one conclusion: the journey matters much more than the destination:
“I would say that the biggest thing I came across is life is more the journey than it is what you want. It’s like, what you actually go about, how it happens when it’s happening. I mean, if you were using this in a band situation, it’d be like, every band wants to be huge and playing stadiums, but the real part about it is trying to get there. You want to be enlightened. You want to achieve certain things. You want to do all this stuff. And some people, they want to skip over the process of it, and they just want the end result. That’s not fun.”
It’s fascinating that this journey-versus-destination theme feels like a statement of intent in a state that is notoriously very conservative and religious. Was that intentional?
“I mean, my parents raised me Christian until whenever. I don’t know what age I was, but I started refusing to go to church, and that was a whole issue. Anytime they ask, ‘How’d you end up like this?’ I’m like, ‘You started it. You did all this.’ Essentially, one of my dad’s friends visited from Norway, and he was a metalhead and had all this music. I had no idea what that stuff was. I was just like, ‘What the fuck is all this stuff?’ I was like 12 and knew I needed all of [the metal].”
Watch the video for “Betrayal of the Queen” here:
For more from Necrofier, find them on Facebook, Instagram, and Bandcamp.
Photo courtesy of Necrofier and Dwayne Cathey
